CSS Basics: The Second “S” in CSS

CSS is an abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheets.

While most of the discussion about CSS on the web (or even here on CSS-Tricks) is centered around writing styles and how the cascade affects them, what we don’t talk a whole lot about is the sheet part of the language. So let’s give that lonely second “S” a little bit of the spotlight and understand what we mean when we say CSS is a style sheet.

The Sheet Contains the Styles

The cascade describes how styles interact with one another. The styles make up the actual code. Then there’s the sheet that contains that code. Like a sheet of paper that we write on, the “sheet” of CSS is the digital file where styles are coded.

If we were to illustrate this, the relationship between the three sort of forms a cascade:

The sheet holds the styles.

There can be multiple sheets all continuing multiple styles all associated with one HTML document. The combination of those and the processes of figuring out what styles take precedence to style what elements is called the cascade (That first “C” in CSS).

The Sheet is a Digital File

The sheet is such a special thing that it’s been given its own file extension: .css. You have the power to create these files on your own. Creating a CSS file can be done in any text editor. They are literally text files. Not “rich text” documents or Word documents, but plain ol’ text.

If you’re on Mac, then you can fire up TextEdit to start writing CSS. Just make sure it’s in “Plain Text” mode.

If you’re on Windows, the default Notepad app is the equivalent. Heck, you can type styles in just about any plain text editor to write CSS, even if that’s not what it says it was designed to do.

Whatever tool you use, the key is to save your document as a .css file. This can usually be done by simply add that to your file name when saving. Here’s how that looks in TextEdit:

Seriously, the choice of which text editor to use for writing CSS is totally up to you. There are many, many to choose from, but here are a few popular ones:

The Sheet is Not Required for HTML

You saw the example of a barebones web page above. No web page is required to use a stylesheet.

Also, we can technically write CSS directly in the HTML using the HTML style attribute. This is called inline styling and it goes a little something like this if you imagine you’re looking at the code of an HTML file:

That does indeed make the HTML easier to read, already making it better than inline styling. Still, it’s hard to manage all styles this way because it has to be managed on each and every webpage of a site, meaning one “quick” change might have to be done several times, depending on how many pages we’re dealing with.

An external sheet that can be called once in the <head> is usually your best bet.

The Sheet is Important

I hope that you’re starting to see the importance of the sheet by this point. It’s a core part of writing CSS. Without it, styles would be difficult to manage, HTML would get cluttered, and the cascade would be nonexistent in at least one case.

The sheet is the core component of CSS. Sure, it often appears to play second fiddle to the first “S” but perhaps that’s because we all have an quiet understanding of its importance.

Leveling Up

Now that you’re equipped with information about stylesheets, here are more resources you jump into to get a deeper understanding for how CSS behaves:

Specifics on Specificity – The cascade is a confusing concept and this article breaks down the concept of specificity, which is a method for how to manage it.

Override Inline Styles with CSS – This is an oldie, but goodie. While the technique is probably not best practice today, it’s a good illustration of how to override those inline styles we mentioned earlier.